On July 1 we lived a historic day, to say the least. The power of the majority was demonstrated, the political involvement of our society increased with a record participation rates, and, with an overwhelming majority vote, the necessary change of direction for this country was decided.
Since then, a lot has been said about the acceptance of defeat by less favored candidates and their supporters, but the truth is that the reason we did not live through a post-election crisis is thanks to the overwhelming results.
It is distrust that is linked to our public life as a country; and not only since 1988, when most authorized sources claim electoral fraud was perpetrated. If we go back to the dawn of the 20th century, we find electoral fraud in the very genesis of modern Mexico, when Porfirio Díaz, having been forced to call elections after the publication of “The Presidential Succession” in 1910 by Francisco I. Madero, decides to take away his opponent’s triumph. We all know about the following chain of events that resulted in more than a decade of a troubled national life.
This last election also had a major scandal on social media: – along the lines of “Millennials discover…” – the amount of ballots available in special voting posts. Ours is a system directly descendant from our history, tied to an analog system with many methods of verification and control – and lack thereof.
However, today technology can give us an ideal way to banish distrust altogether, to make citizen participation easier, and perhaps on the way, generate savings in the budget of the electoral bodies: the Blockchain.
The Blockchain is a chain of articulated, encrypted blocks, transparent between both ends and impossible to tamper with. Its main applications so far have been mainly in the financial world and it has become famous for being the technology that supports cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin.
One of the limitations of Blockchain is scalability, since only a certain number of blocks can be added to the chain. However, with the intervention of other technologies, such as biometric authentication, an electoral process could be carried out in an effective and reliable manner, at the scale which a country like Mexico requires with an electoral roll of 89 million people.
With the acceleration of technological change, we hope that in 2024, when it is time again to express the will of the people, it can be done with mechanisms which guarantee that the results are reliable, and with the possibility for everyone to participate without the need to go to a specific box.
At Mijo! Brands we are very familiar the veracity and power that technology can add to business. We are focused on the digital world and we help our customers improve their impact and grow their businesses. Contact us to get our team of specialists started on generating a strategy for you to also receive the benefits of new technologies by contacting your ideal audience.
Luis Estrada is a Content Editor with Mijo! Brands, a creative digital marketing agency with presence in Mexico City, Guadalajara and Puerto Vallarta. Luis has a degree in Journalism and Collective Communication from UNAM, with years of experience in business, technology and lifestyle journalism in multimedia with diverse audiences. Active content creator, now in the publicity sphere, he takes advantage of his incipient multiple personality disorder to adjust to varying tone of voice of his clients. An explainer by nature and a collector of useless data, he falls in love with theater and mass culture, writes reviews for fun as a frustrated movie buff and is an occasional lover of kitsch.